Currently I’m reading Citizen Marketers which is an interesting insight into how social media has made word of mouth easier and how companies ignore their customers at their peril.
Then today, I stumbled across this:
http://forums.confetti.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=93532&st=0
In case you don’t want to read it, basically a bride to be wrote to Noel Gay, the management company of Four Poofs and a Piano, of Jonathan Ross fame, asking how much it would cost to hire them for her wedding. The email was duly forwarded on within the company, resulting in an email response to the bride. As follows:
Bride’s email:
"We are getting married on Sunday 30 September 2007 at Wakefield, West Yorkshire. Every week when I tune into Jonathan Ross I say it would be great if they could play at our wedding so here I am to see how much an appearance from 4 poofs would cost. I expect its out of my budget but at least I’ll know I’ve tried!
Look forward to hearing from you."
From ‘Jane’ to ‘Lou’
Dear Lou
Oh dear!
Another …Thank you.
Jane
From ‘Lou’ to ‘Catriona’
another bloody wedding – what’s wrong with people?
Thank you
Lou
From ‘Catriona’ to the bride:
Dear Karen,
Thank you for your interest in 4 Poofs & A Piano. This date looks to be feasible. The boys usually go out for around £4,000 for this sort of thing.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Kind regards,
Catriona
The bride, outraged, posted it on a public forum – full of other brides (and presumably potential customers) who were also outraged and quite rightly she replies saying she really didn’t think they meant to leave the insults on there, and includes the link to the topic in the forum. Someone from Noel Gay comes on to make an apology (which most of the readers don’t buy) and the damage is done.
Then I write about it on here and who knows who will read it after that? Which is a perfect example of how powerful word of mouth can be.
I certainly won’t be using Noel Gay next time I need four poofs.
We did it, we got hitched Turkish style! Thanks to everyone who made it over to Turkey for our nuptials. We had an absolutely fantastic time! We hope it was memorable, well the cake was if nothing else!
I survived my hen do. A ridiculous amount of dodgy cocktails, beer and German wine later I’ve dragged my sorry behind back to the office. I got off fairly lightly on the tacky factor – a plastic tiara and a flashing L plate, well I guess it was par for the course. Explaining endlessly what an L plate is and how it’s relevant to getting married was interesting, considering my pigeon German (I can ask for 8 beers fluently now though).
I have just over 6 weeks until our big day. The suits are ordered, the dress is bought and the nerves are kicking in. I keep expecting someone to pop up and say "you can’t get married, you’re not a grown up!" So far we’ve managed to have a reasonably calm lead up. No tantrums or bridezilla moments so far – but give it time. My hen do in Berlin is next Saturday so no doubt I’ll have a sore head and a few tales to tell after that little shin dig.
